And Wrote My Story Anyway

Boswell Barbara

Description

Part literary theory, part feminist historiography, this book examines novels in English by black South African women writers who shaped the literary landscape of South African fiction writing.
Part literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism critically examines influential novels by eminent black female writers.

Studying these writers’ key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women’s fiction interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.

This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women’s fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production.

Reading their fiction as theory, these writers’ works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.



Acknowledgements

Author’s Preface

Acronyms

Introduction ‘… And Wrote My Story Anyway’: Black South African Women’s Fiction and the Nation

Chapter 1 Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing

Chapter 2 Rewriting the Apartheid Nation: Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo

Chapter 3 Dissenting Daughters: Girlhood and Nation in the Fiction of Farida Karodia and Agnes Sam

Chapter 4 Interrogating ‘Truth’ in the Post-Apartheid Nation: Zoë Wicomb and Sindiwe Magona

Chapter 5 Making Personhood; Remaking History in Yvette Christiansë and Rayda Jacobs’s Neo-Slave Narratives

Chapter 6 Black Women Writing ‘New’ South African Masculinities: Kagiso Lesego Molopes and Zukiswa Wanner

Conclusion Literature as Theory: Towards a Black South African Feminist Criticism

Select Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• General
• Literary theory
• General officer
• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776146208
• Langue: English

Extrait

AND WROTE MY STORY ANYWAY
AND WROTE MY STORY ANYWAY
BLACK SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN’S NOVELS AS FEMINISM
BARBARA BOSWELL
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Barbara Boswell 2020
Published edition © Wits University Press 2020
First published 2020
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12020096185
978-1-77614-618-5 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-622-2 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-619-2 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-620-8 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-621-5 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
For the Miriam Tlali portrait photograph: Photograph by Adrian Steirn , courtesy of 21 Icons South Africa
Project manager: Elaine Williams
Copyeditor: Lynda Gilfillan
Proofreader: Inga Norenius
Indexer: Elaine Williams
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typeset in 10.5 point Plantin
Dedicated to Noel Madden, with love
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Author’s Preface
Acronyms
Introduction: ‘And Wrote My Story Anyway’: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism
1 Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing
2 Rewriting the Apartheid Nation: Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo
3 Dissenting Daughters: Girlhood and Nation in the Fiction of Farida Karodia and Agnes Sam
4 Interrogating ‘Truth’ in the Post-Apartheid Nation: Zoë Wicomb and Sindiwe Magona
5 Making Personhood: Remaking History in Yvette Christiansë and Rayda Jacobs’s Neo-Slave Narratives
6 Black Women Writing ‘New’ South African Masculinities: Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner
Conclusion: Towards a Black South African Feminist Criticism
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my patchwork quilt of transnational community that has supported my work, read various drafts of the manuscript, and engaged in edifying conversations, encouraging me to complete this book. I am thankful to Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Sindiwe Magona, Gladys Thomas, Yvette Christiansë, Gabeba Baderoon, Diana Ferrus, Malika Ndlovu, A Lynn Bolles, Deborah Rosenfelt, Elsa Barkley Brown, Merle Collins, Angel David Nieves, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Deborah McDowell, Carol Corneilse, Angel Miles, Kimberlee Staking, Bianca Laureano, Jing Song, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Tyler Fleming, Dennis Tyler, Shanna Smith, Jennifer Bacon, Renetta Garrison Tull, Wendy Carter-Veale, Makhosazana Xaba, Athambile Masola, Floretta Boonzaier, Zoë Marks, Yaliwe Clarke, Polo Moji, Nadia Davids, Mandisa Haarhoff, Sindiswa Busuku, Kharnita Mohamed, Sandy Young, Cassie Premo Steele, Harry Garuba, Christopher Ouma, Roshan Cader, Lynda Gilfillan, Elaine Williams, Natasha Diedricks, Precious Sharon Sinovuyo Bikitsha, and Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane, who were all part of my writing community, reading various drafts of this work, and holding space for me as I completed it. I am also thankful for the input of the anonymous peer reviewers, whose comments refined and improved this book. I acknowledge the financial support of the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Carter G Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and the University of Cape Town in bringing this project to fruition. Finally, I am grateful to my family for their unfailing love and support, especially my son, Jesse Meintjes, and my mother, Una Boswell.
Author’s Preface
I forcefully created for myself, under extremely hostile conditions, my ideal life. I took an obscure and almost unknown village in the Southern African bush and made it my own hallowed ground … My work was always tentative because it was always so completely new: it created new worlds out of nothing .
Bessie Head
— A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings
I have always reserved a special category for myself, as a writer – that of pioneer blazing a new trail into the future .
Bessie Head
— A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings
Imagine one possibility of this future Bessie Head conjures. It is 1994. A young woman – me – designated ‘coloured’ by apartheid law, and about to come of age in the new, democratic South Africa, working as a trainee journalist at an alternative newspaper in Cape Town. I’m assigned a work of fiction to review, The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories , by a writer unfamiliar to me: Bessie Head. Extremely conscious of her agency as a writer, and wishing to leave a legacy, Head had been writing into a future she could neither have predicted nor anticipated. Yet our meeting on the page was an encounter she must have foreseen; writing, as she did, across time and space. Meeting her like this knocked my world off its axis.
As a child who’d grown up during the last decade of formal apartheid, I’d received an education in accordance with my designated place in South Africa’s racial hierarchy. An avid reader, my literary diet had consisted of books borrowed from a government library, and literature prescribed by apartheid bureaucrats for language instruction in school. Black writers of any gender were excluded from these works, since most of them – and their work – had been banned.
The political changes in South Africa leading to the first democratic election in 1994 unleashed a flood of previously banned literature. It was at this moment that I became acquainted with Head’s first novella, The Cardinals , written in the early 1960s and published posthumously in 1993. It was her only published work of fiction set and written in Cape Town, before she was ‘endorsed out’ of South Africa in 1964 on an exit permit that would exile her to Botswana for the rest of her life, prohibiting her return to the land of her birth.
The experience of reading Head’s work was profoundly unsettling. Try as I might, I was unable to produce the required book review for my newspaper’s art pages. Head’s writing confounded me in two ways: this was the first time I’d experienced the city where I was born and had lived in on the pages of a work of fiction. In The Cardinals , Head had vibrantly and intimately rendered the place that I loved, my home city. She had written a love letter to a place I was about to inhabit, for the first time, as an autonomous, liberated citizen. As a black girl who had been prohibited by apartheid law throughout my life from entering certain public spaces in Cape Town, I was acutely aware of how space was opening up to me. I went everywhere I could, determined to experience everything the city had to offer. The place she had sketched in her novella some thirty years prior was the same living, breathing city I was now exploring daily.
The experience of having my world depicted in this way was, at the time, alien. Until then, the worlds I had entered through fiction had always existed elsewhere. While I enjoyed being transported to foreign places, it had never occurred to me that my own world could be the subject or setting for fiction. The literature I’d previously read had always centred some other place, elsewhere, or the subjectivity of someone who didn’t look like me. Discovering my home town, in all its beauty and ugliness, as a central character in a work of fiction drew me into the text in a completely new way. Here was a new space – the discursive – opening up to me, which I explored with as much zest as the physical geography of the city.
The Cardinals intrigued and mystified me on another level, too. Its main character, Mouse, was a young black woman who had just started working as a journalist. She wrote fiction in her spare time, and the novella was a kunstlerroman (artist’s novel) illuminating Mouse’s internal struggles as she mastered the art of writing. Unsure of her talent and unsure of her voice or whether she even had anything to say, she nevertheless carried on writing. As a fledgling writer myself, I connected deeply with this character. Though acutely aware of my power to represent people in the way ‘news’ was constructed, I was simultaneously afraid of this power. The character’s struggles with finding her voice thus resonated deeply on a personal as well as political level. Never before had I encountered the subjectivity of a young coloured woman at the centre of a novel. The message I had received through twenty years of fiction reading was that the interiority of a young black woman embedded within apartheid’s social relations was simply not a subject worthy of literature.
Head’s work jolted me awake, I realised, because I had not thought it possible that a black woman could be a writer. My education and socialisation had led me to believe that producing art – the production of a beautiful object, for no reason other than the pleasure of creating – was an activity that I, or someone like me, should not consider a possibility. Reading The Cardinals crystallised for me the fact that a black woman who had lived under apartheid, in similar conditions to mine, had succeeded in carving out a creative life – a fact that, until then, had not been a possibility I’d been remotely aware of.
What Head had ‘forcefully created’ ( A Woman Alone , 28) through her writing was not only her ‘own hallowed ground’, but also a space into which I could enter, dream different dreams, and imagine myself as a creative being. In ‘creat[ing] new worlds out of nothing’ (28), Head also remade the world for me, conjuring a host of new possibilities. I have been guided by these possibilities in writing this book.
Head’s fiction and essays reveal great insights and self-conscious reflection on the transgressive nature of writing as a black South African woman. Her writing informs the perspective I bring to the work of constructing this history of black South African wome